Earlier this month Tumblr announced that from 17th December 2018 it would no longer host adult content on the site.
This came after the site temporarily removed its app from the App Store on 16th November 2018 following reports that images of child sexual exploitation were repeatedly getting through Tumblr’s filters.
The site famously has lax rules regarding nudity, and many artists use the platform to showcase their works. Users can join the platform from the age of 13, and there is a child-safe filter which supposedly restricts young users from accessing Tumblr’s user generated adult content.
Over time, two problems started to appear. One: the child-safe filter was failing to keep out adult content. Two: the adult filter was failing to keep out images of illegal and harmful acts such as child sexual exploitation.
How did the problem become so bad? And why are the Tumblr board only acting now, and acting in this way?
David Karp and Marco Arment launched the site in 2007 as a microblogging platform. It was different from other emerging platforms, and more customisable than sites like Facebook, making it attractive to artists who wanted to use the platform as a portfolio. Tumblr also allowed users to like other people’s posts and reblog posts on their own blog with the likes, comments and reblogs forming a sort of daisy chain of notes attached to an original post. The often anonymous user-generated content ranges from the silly to the absurd, and much of the viral stuff that has made its way to your Facebook or Twitter has been plucked from the zany beating heart of Tumblr.
Tumblr signed up tens of thousands of users in its first two weeks, and the artistic, aesthetic and anonymous traits of Tumblr have made it appealing to high profile figures. Lorde has one and even Kanye West curates an anonymous Tumblr (Is this Kanye West’s secret tumblr?).
Designers and artists make use of Tumblr’s customisable feature, sharing content and #inspiration.
The ability to make each blog as individual as, well, the individual curating it is part of what makes the site so appealing to young people.
But Tumblr has not been without controversy in its 11 year life. The infamous banning of Tumblr user Pizza and the site’s seemingly changeable policy on monetising content has led many to question whom the site serves.
But alongside the developing absurdist, confessional youth-culture of Tumblr came the rise of the porn bots.
Porn bots are Tumblr accounts that only post pornographic images and they essentially exist to make money. A porn bot would follow hundreds of new blogs a day, and those users would then click on the porn bot profile to see who was following them. The goal is to get a user to click on a link, either in the porn bot’s profile or on a post, leading to a site where the porn bot operator could make money either by ad revenue or a more direct payment scheme. In recent years the effectiveness of these scams has lessened, but why did Tumblr not just ban the porn bots? Some claim that it is because the porn bots bring a lot of traffic to Tumblr and banning porn bots would eliminate a big source of visitors.
22% of the traffic Tumblr receives from other sites is going straight through to one of these porn blogs and amongst Tumblr’s 200,000 most popular domains over 10% contain adult material.
So far, so predictable. A successful site makes money from user-generated content, often created by young people, and it also makes money from web traffic to pornography hosted on the site. But it was not just the porn bots creating adult content, many cam girls and adult performers created their own content and hosted it on the site, making use of Tumblr’s relaxed policy and monetising their blog.
For years Tumblr has offered the ability to filter out explicit content, with questionable results, and in March 2013 they introduced “safe search” but it wasn’t until 2017 that Tumblr introduced “safe mode,” an opt in service which placed a “sensitive media” message over any content that had been flagged. In addition to this, they announced that they would now automatically hide explicit blogs from web searches, logged-out users, and users under 18.
Many were left wondering why Tumblr had not already enabled this, as a great many of its users are under 18.
Anecdotally, users continued to report that porn bots were still a problem, and increasingly hardcore, violent and explicit images were not being flagged by the system’s filters.
On November 16th 2018, Tumblr’s app disappeared from the iOS app store. Tumblr released a statement explaining that during an audit they had discovered content that was not being caught by the filters:
We’re committed to helping build a safe online environment for all users, and we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to media featuring child sexual exploitation and abuse. As this is an industry-wide problem, we work collaboratively with our industry peers and partners like [the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children] (NCMEC) to actively monitor content uploaded to the platform. Every image uploaded to Tumblr is scanned against an industry database of known child sexual abuse material, and images that are detected never reach the platform. A routine audit discovered content on our platform that had not yet been included in the industry database. We immediately removed this content. Content safeguards are a challenging aspect of operating scaled platforms. We’re continuously assessing further steps we can take to improve and there is no higher priority for our team.
The site had previously been blocked in some worldwide regions because of the adult content hosted on its platform, but this was the first time Tumblr had been pulled from the App Store due to illegal and harmful images.
On 3rd December 2018 Tumblr announced that they would no longer be hosting any adult content on the site. Here they explain what they mean by “adult content”:
One wonders what a "female-presenting nipple" is.
Prominent sex-education content creators such as Laci Green have lamented the move:
and the alleged demise of Tumblr has spawned its own memes:
It has been suggested that the new policy could mean over zealous filters restrict educational content, particularly content made with the LGBT community in mind. Some critics say that the move could be disastrous for sex workers who use the site and argue that Tumblr has been one of the few corners of the internet where honest and destigmatising conversations about sex and sexuality could take place. However, when research suggests that viewing images of sexual exploitation can be traumatising to both young people and adults it begs the question: why did Tumblr ever host pornography in the first place whilst at the same time encouraging 13 year olds to sign up to the site? Nearly half of Tumblr users have seen pornography on the site, whether they were searching for it or not, and over 10% of those users are under 18.
So what really is the problem with pornography no longer being hosted on Tumblr? There are hundreds of sites, many with significantly more traffic than Tumblr, that can host pornographic content and sex worker services. Pornhub had 33.5 billion visits this year and 4.79 million new videos were uploaded in the same period. “Lesbian” is the most popular search term and “teen” is 7th.
Pornhub has an estimated worth in the billions and globally, porn is a (US)$97billion industry.
When viewing pornographic content on a site like Tumblr, users can view porn in a relatively sanitised setting. There is not an overwhelming amount of adverts, and users don’t have to click through three or four windows to reach the content. Users also are not viewing pornographic content alongside thumbnails showing that the most viewed videos this week include words and phrases like “fucked rough” “teen” and “siblings twisted sex games."
The number of child on child sexual assaults has almost doubled in the UK and some experts attribute this to the ease with which young people can access violent pornography on their phones. A recent review found 50 peer-reviewed studies suggested a direct link between porn use and sexual violence. Hardcore images can be found only a few taps away.
The porn industry is built on the backs of trafficked and abused women, and many studies have shown the harmful effects of viewing pornography. An NSPCC spokesman confirmed that a third of child sexual offences are committed by other children, and access to obscene content has been labelled by experts as being the primary cause.
Tumblr is merely a symptom of a much larger problem, namely, the proliferation of pornography in our society. Tumblr banning adult content will not stop the trafficking of women and the harmful effects of pornography on our society as a whole. Additionally, due to the site’s actions some sex workers are going to lose their revenue stream. However, porn consumers have a buffet of other choices if they want to access porn. Maybe, just maybe, Tumblr’s restrictions will stop 13 year olds stumbling onto traumatising images, and we can gain some space to have an honest conversation about pornography, its role in the larger picture of violence against women, and how we move forward as a society.
Sobering Maid
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